The present invention relates to the field of using and/or editing and/or collaborating, with compositions (e.g., documents, and images, including but not limited to music). More particularly, the present invention relates to transposing, communicating, and displaying composition (e.g., images or documents or text), either in batch or collaboratively in a real time environment, and to provide the displaying of the compositions, with or without their respective changes or revisions.
Musicians typically work from sheet music. When composing, they write the notes down on paper that has a number of staffs. If the musician transposes a composition from one key to another, the notes are also written down on the staff paper. The scores for different instruments must also be generated and written down. All of the scores are then copied for distribution to other musicians and/or music stores.
When performing, the sheet music must be found, for all parts to be played, manually distributed, manually set-up, manually handled (ram pages, etc.). There is also an unfulfilled need for quick access to a more comprehensive database of music for the performing musician, whether he is solo or part of an orchestra. Also, musicians often perform audience requests, and require access to sheet music for requested songs. Presently, there are various combinations of songs compiled in “FAKE” Books, usually by category (e.g., rock, country, blues, big band, etc.). This is only of limited help. Furthermore, the use of paper sheet music is cumbersome and inconvenient; pages often get damaged or lost, and indexed access is poor and slow.
This method of composing and distributing music is inadequate when the music is used by a band or orchestra that requires hundreds of copies. If the conductor desires the piece to be played in a different key or certain sections of the music edited to suit the conductor's tastes, the composition must be rewritten and the new transposed copy distributed to the band or orchestra. This is a very costly, time-consuming, and laborious task if the orchestra has a large number of members.
Additionally, if the composition does not have a part for a certain instrument, the conductor must generate the required part from the original composition. After the score for the required instruments has been generated, the pans must be copied and distributed to the individual musicians. This, again, is a very costly and laborious task if the band has a large number of musicians requiring different parts. There is a need, therefore, for a more efficient way of transposing, editing, and distributing music scores.
Over the past many years, great advances have been made in the electronic input, storage, and display of music. Electronic bands and orchestras are constructed using computers and MIDI equipment. Programs exist for personal computers (e.g., Apple Macintosh, DOS, and Windows machines) for transposing music, composing music, automatically inputting music from direct performance to digitized input (such as directly from a keyboard, electronically through MIDI converters (such as for string instruments), via pickups and microphones, and sequencers, tone generators, etc.)
Musicians often perform both pre-planned and ad hoe compositions during the course of a performance. It would therefore be desirable to have the ability to access a large database of musical compositions on demand. It would also be desirable to permit communication and synchronization of a music presentation to multiple performing musicians who are playing together. It would also be desirable for a performing musician to have his or her performance of the music input, stored and analyzed by an automated system.